In the last two weeks, although almost assuredly having nothing whatsoever to do with the inauguration of an outspoken sustainability-leaning American president, there has been a raft of new and dire warnings about the state of the climate.  These pronouncements have made liberal use of terms like drastic, catastrophic, catastrophe, radical, severe consequences, imperative, must, can’t afford, most serious threat, dire, and on and on.  And, as any good PR person knows, these terms – whether reflective of the truth or not – are designed to do only one thing: influence the political process, either directly or through constituent pressure.

The problem for politicians, or industry leaders, or even everyday caring citizens comes when they read something like this from the Worldwatch Institute: “The world will have to reduce emissions more drastically than has been widely predicted, essentially ending the emission of carbon dioxide by 2050” [emphasis mine].  Or this later in the same source, by Worldwatch president Christopher Flavin: “We can’t afford to let the Copenhagen climate conference fail” [again, emphasis mine].  Statements like these are designed to illicit a fear response in the hope of driving action. The Worldwatch Institute shouldn’t be singled out; they’re not doing anything outside of the norm (and the work they do is good).  But these sorts of statements don’t work as intended, and they’re probably being counterproductive.

Why?  Both cases require that something happen that will almost certainly not, and then what?  Imagining a scenario in which the world stops emitting carbon in 40 years defies any rational understanding of current energy systems, the state of technology like CCS, global economic realities, and our own profound nearly genetic predisposition to react to the immediate.  Likewise, the hammering the world economy has taken over the last year, and its effects in both the industrialized and the developing worlds makes Copenhagen look less and less likely to do anything other than allow nations to affirm the importance of slowing climate change.  An uberKyoto is needed, and we may get it, but not on a timetable that was created in a very different world.

So when these two must haves, after even cursory analysis, appear to be unattainable, what are policymakers, company planners, and individuals supposed to think? Do?  The danger is a not unprecedented feature of many similar campaigns: issue fatigue. People stop caring when they’ve heard so much about an issue that they no longer see a way forward, or it seems too overwhelming.  This is compounded in the case of climate change by the timescale involved and the inability of most people to see demonstrable change or really understand the underlying science.  And, of course, issues fatigue is not just a likely condition of the person on the street, but of everybody involved in the conversation, policymakers maybe more than most.

How bad is it?  A  recent poll conducted by the Pew Center for the People and the Press revealed that among Americans global warming had fallen to dead last in a list of policy priorities.  It’s not much better elsewhere either.  Even in the UK global warming is losing its place at the forefront of concern.  ‘These two data points and others like them, despite the fact that there have been a couple of hundred press reports over the past month or so about the dangers of global warming, suggest something isn’t working anymore.

In turn, of course, that begs the crucial question: how then does anyone make any progress?  Answering that question requires that we first step back and reexamine some assumptions about the entire climate change debate.  This will be the focus of my next few posts.

First up is the relationship between mitigation and adaptation.